Mobile positioning technologies enable a mobile device to approximate its real world location. A mobile device can utilizes one or more positioning techniques, such as a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning technique, wireless network based positioning (e.g., positioning based on wireless network access points (APs), based on cellular network transmitters, etc.), as well as other positioning techniques. Furthermore, more and more other mobile devices, such as connected or wearable devices (e.g., smart watches, smart glasses, fitness trackers, smart garments, medical devices, gaming devices, etc.), perform device positioning for various purposes.
To make these techniques more efficient and/or accurate, assistance data is often utilized when performing positioning. The positioning assistance data can include various types of information that the mobile device or wearable device may utilize when performing a positioning process, such as identities and locations of wireless network APs, information for acquiring and using GNSS signals, communication protocols, whether an AP is a mobile or stationary AP, as well as other data. To obtain this assistance data, the mobile device performing, or that will perform, the positioning process queries a server for positioning assistance data, downloads the positioning assistance data, and then stores the data at that mobile device. This process may need to be repeated during the positioning process, such as when the mobile device moves locations such that previous assistance data is no longer relevant, when there is a significant passage of time and the previous assistance data is out of date, etc. Furthermore, each mobile device acquires its own positioning assistance data.
The acquisition, monitoring, and processing of the assistance data by the mobile devices are both energy and computationally intensive processes. This becomes even more acute for connected and wearable devices with limited storage for potentially large amounts of assistance data, limited power resources for continually obtaining assistance data, limited bandwidth for accessing an assistance data server, etc.